


The Uncanny Valley

by lunaseemoony



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hallucinations, Post-Episode: s02e13 Doomsday, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 06:07:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4380149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunaseemoony/pseuds/lunaseemoony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Losing Rose plunges the Doctor into a dark place where he pushes his sleep cycle so close to the breaking point that he’s plagued with nightly hallucinations. In one, he’s visited by Bad Wolf, who has something important to tell him if he could listen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Uncanny Valley

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet is for roseoswiins's prompt

 

The most cathartic cure for a brokenhearted Time Lord was to push his sleep cycle to the limits. And as long as he was traveling alone there was nobody to trick into thinking that he was perfectly fine. He could push himself to his breaking point. Nothing felt quite so good as all of the blood rushing to his feet as he passed out onto the grated console room floor. It was more or less the opposite feeling as when he’d fallen in love, so it was all too appropriate. He would awake later having no clue as to just how long he’d been under. Without sleep his time senses could be severely diminished. He could work himself up into a fever, which he could then make worse by trying to still regulate his internal temperature with virtually no energy to accomplish the task. He was plagued with hallucinations. Well, they weren’t always plagues. Some of them were delightful, sinful even.

The Doctor was strewn out on his bed late at night, not to sleep but to rub away some tension that was eating away at his nerves. He’d considered sleep, but tonight was one that was plagued with thoughts of Rose. Every hour of each day was plagued with thoughts of Rose. But at night they got ten times worse. He’d had so many chances to truly make the best use of his time with Rose, and he blew them all. She would have been so receptive to him. He knew she looked. She’d  _told_  him how she felt. There were times when she’d laid it on so thick, and he’d in turn been so thickheaded about it.

One night she flew into his bed following a nightmare about the beast in the pit on Krop Tor. She’d crept under his sheets, a trembling little lamb cuddled up to him. He was only wearing pyjama bottoms and she’d only thrown on an oversized sleep shirt. He’d provided her with comfort and assuaged her fears. But he’d been a coward and very gently ignored her subtle advances. It would only make things worse when she was gone, he told himself. In the blink of an eye her delicate life would become dust on the wind and he’d be left alone again. Well, it had happened anyway. They were severed in twain, and he received a painful cut that he was presently letting fester.

So he replayed that night in his head while tugging away at his grief. It was a feverish night, since he was still tiptoeing along the precipice of his absolute breaking point. At times it felt as though he was racing along that razor’s edge, hearts threatening to bring him to a crashing halt at any given moment. He lay naked from head to toe, shivering madly like a fawn on the first blistering spring morning. His skin was the dewy grass shaking in the wind. The only parts of him that were completely still were his cock wrapped firmly in his hand, and his eyes squeezed shut. In his mind his hotblooded human was sheltering him from the cold and wrapping herself around him in the most intimate way that he should have had her in. That night Rose had been so terrified. But he would have – should have – lured out her confidence until her feisty heartbeat returned and she was pushing him down onto his own bed. He called out to that heartbeat. Every breath was another pull, another ache briefly melted away under his fingers. They weren’t Rose. Nobody could ever replace her. And he was never going to see her again. He knew this. But it didn’t stop him from calling out to her.

And with a flash of lightning coupled with a loud booming crack she appeared before him. It was all proof of course that he was hallucinating. Yet it was the realest one he’d ever had in his long life. That familiar golden dust escaped from her every pore and bathed his eyes in its golden glow. Yet she stood panting and frozen, almost as if in shock. It couldn’t be, he thought. The golden goddess of his dreams and nightmares couldn’t be shocked by anything.

“Doctor…” she murmured.

“You killed me,” he accused, and shot up out of bed.

She backed up and shook her head, mouth hanging open. “I’ve only got a few minutes before my power runs out and I’m gone again.”

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he growled and prodded her chest. He had her pinned against the wall.

“This is wrong. It’s all wrong. You’re not the right…”

He huffed. Typical. “There you go again telling me what is and what isn’t.”

“Either that or something’s wrong with you. Oh my Doctor…” her voice seemed to drift off as she spoke, and just like last time she gave him that same haunting look with her bright amber eyes. “I’m coming for you. I just need you to know that.”

“If you think I’m afraid of you, you’re sorely mistaken,” he growled, and leaned against her, shoving his erection into her belly. “You’re not fucking with me, not like this at least. Not when I need Rose this much.” Tears escaped his eyes. She was so cruel. 

“You think I’m…” he heard her mutter under her breath. And then she spoke up, “I’ve only got a few minutes. You killed me too, remember? I died for you.”

He let a vicious grin tug at his mouth. “I suppose that makes us even then, doesn’t it?”

“I really mean it, I only have but a couple minutes. Let’s not waste it.”

The Doctor’s eyes burned just meeting her eyes, but he couldn’t tear them away. They were still her eyes, and he still ached to see them, even if looking was painful. They searched him for approval, a strange notion for a woman who considered herself a goddess. But his hallucinations were growing stronger by the day. He saw what he wanted to, felt what he wanted to. And what he wanted to see was himself pressing her against a wall to claim the goddess as his own before she disappeared.

That was precisely what he did. He couldn’t be bothered with clothes. The time for that was daydreams and imaginations. Right then he had a very clear goal, and she was doing nothing to stop him from getting to it. He watched her wriggle out of one pant leg and one end of her knickers. That was more than enough for him. She wrapped her arms around his neck tight so he could pick up her legs. She had the thighs of a python, squeezing the life out of his hips. He bruised her lips with a kiss that no amount of dreaming could ever bring life to on most days. He put his all into it, silencing the goddess only until he let her breathe when she warmed his clammy shoulder with her moaning gasp.

“I miss you,” she hissed at him.

“I need you,” he returned.

All it took was one dig of her heels in his arse to remind him they had precious little time. He could make her stay, it was his hallucination. But a deep churning in his gut made him believe her. Either way, her legs were wrapped around him. This was never going to happen again, not so bloody vividly at least. Again, he left her completely speechless when he slammed his hips forward. A brief glimmer of the Doctor that she once knew burst forth and worried he might have hurt her. He couldn’t bring sound to the thought, but she understood and urged him on.

“I only have a minute,” she whispered. “Hurry, my Doctor.”

“Why is there never any time?!” He roared as he buried himself inside her. “I hate it!” He wanted to simply melt away into her warmth, to let himself be bathed in her glow. But all he could think about was in a short moment she would disappear again. He hated her for what she’d done. But he hated more that she was going to leave him. She wasn’t his Rose, but he could settle. “I need you… Rose. I need Rose too much! It’s not fair!”

She soothed him and hushed him in between kisses. She was too much like his Rose, too soft, too tender, too warm. Feeling his tension welling up in his groin only made it worse, because his timing would be dreadful either way. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut and pretend that it was her and not the cruel goddess, but she commanded his attention both with her chilling echoes and moans as well as her bright eyes luring him in. There had always been a little twinkle of sadness in her eyes. But this time it was palpable, even as she urged him on with her soft words. She knew as well as he did that closer he came to driving himself to completion, the closer he would be to the same sort of crippling loneliness that gave birth to this fever dream in the first place. Still, he didn’t stop it when it came.

“Doctor, I’m coming for you. Remember that, okay?”

He pressed his head to her chest to soak in her heartbeat one last time. He scarcely heard what she was saying. He lifted his head for a moment and just frowned. She might not have been the one he wanted, but she was still  _a_ Rose, one that was about to leave him again.

“Everything will be okay. I will make it okay. You know I can.”

Before he could even reply, she fell away from him in that same booming crack and flash of light that brought her in. He barely had the energy to drag himself back to his bed, feeling like a dried up stack of bones by the time he crashed onto it. He finally slept that night, replaying the goddess’s promises in his mind. He clung to them as he had to her imagined skin, the only bit of life that he cared to hold on to. She had made good on her promises before. He considered that maybe she could do it again, whatever that meant for either of them.


End file.
